One luscious chassis decked out to the nines, to make any geeks mouth water.

You dont put Puff Daddy and his entourage up in a one-room studio for the night, and we sure as hell arent going to put Dream Machine and all its glamorous hardware in anything less than the baddest, bitchinest enclosure available. This year, that enclosure is the soon-to-be-released Silverstone TJ09 full-tower. And even though the case was positively striking in stock trim, we went ahead and sent it to the wizards at Smooth Creations for a custom paint job. The result is a case so seductive it could easily be the centerfold in Playrig magazine, if there were such a thing.

The TJ09 has big shoes to fill, and it fills them admirably. We used its predecessor, the TJ07, for last years Dream Machine, and it swallowed over $10K of hardware without flinching. The TJ09 is just as capable, despite being a tad smaller than its predecessor, and its the only fulltower on the market thats new enough, big enough, and sexy enough to take on DM2006. Naturally, it has all the dreamy requisite extras, including a slide-out motherboard tray, the copious cooling of five 12cm fans, and room for six hard drives, a PSU of any dimensions, and all our sundry other gear.

The most interesting aspect of its design is the large ventilation chamber in the lower portion of the case, which allows cool air from outside to be sucked into the caseâ€™s gaping maw via a 12cm fan positioned at the gaps entrance. And the paint job? Well, whats to say other than that it costs $800 and is worth every cent. You truly have to see a Smooth Creations paint job in person to appreciate its profound wow-factor. It all amounts to an enclosure thats as audacious as its innards.

This mod, titled Order 66 after the order given to the clone troopers by Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith to exterminate the Jedi, represents the helmet of a Clone Trooper (as depicted on the cover art of the video game Star Wars BattleFront 2). The custom paintjob was done by Smooth Creations (they also painted my Hypersonic laptop with Star Wars-themed graphics).

I approached Smooth with this project after I received my new Hypersonic laptop adorned with their paint. I was amazed at the quality of the air-brushed graphics and the color-shifting paint. When I told Smooth Creations I wanted something with a Star Wars theme they came up with the helmet idea and ran with it.

The outcome is a work of art. The custom laser-etched window was created and installed by HyperKore (www.hyperkore.com) . I sent the door and a graphic of General Grievous from Star Wars and they did the rest (including cutting the window into the door not an easy task given the design of the Alienware Predator door).